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How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

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Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#21

Post by erikpukinskis »

pervycreeper wrote: post #19
erikpukinskis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's still not really fair, as that really implies that recuiters pay less attention to males, e.g. spending less time and money finding them and recruiting them. You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to males. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% male, then that is money largely spent on recruiting males. Spending mon…

Parent meant "fairness" to apply on the individual level, rather than on a collective level, I believe. That is, resources expended per candidate would be comparable, rather than having the total sum of resources expended on female candidates be equal to those spent on male candidates (mutatis mutandis: hires, members of the public, etc.). Which is presumably what you mean.

resources expended per candidate

That doesn't make any sense. Recruitment happens before candidates even exist. Candidates are the result of recruitment.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#22

Post by masterzora »

pervycreeper wrote: post #19
erikpukinskis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's still not really fair, as that really implies that recuiters pay less attention to males, e.g. spending less time and money finding them and recruiting them. You're wrong. It is fair. "Normal" recruiting promotion budgets are obviously paying more attention to males. For example, if you market primarily to CS departments which are 90% male, then that is money largely spent on recruiting males. Spending mon…

Parent meant "fairness" to apply on the individual level, rather than on a collective level, I believe. That is, resources expended per candidate would be comparable, rather than having the total sum of resources expended on female candidates be equal to those spent on male candidates (mutatis mutandis: hires, members of the public, etc.). Which is presumably what you mean.

But even resources per candidate isn't a good measure of fairness. Just consider the trivial illustrative possibility of a normal job board posting that every potential candidate sees. In today's world it is likely that more men would respond than women by a nontrivial factor. Everyone who responds receives equal treatment and equal devotion of resources and, in the end, significantly more men are hired than women. Now, imagine that we have the exact same scenario but somebody is hired to stand next to the job board and tell every woman who comes by "you should apply for this!" More resources are now being expended per woman than per man but the proportion of people responding might be different without being unfair to any particular person.

Granted, there are a lot of trivialities in this example, but it's pretty representative of how such programs are supposed to work.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#23

Post by Smudge »

esrauch wrote: post #7

Unfortunately I think the dismissive attitude of your friend is a direct product of very real reverse discrimination. Anecdotally it really does exist; a female friend of mine was able to easily get interviews at Google, Microsoft and Apple every year despite lousy technical chops and a 2.5 GPA at a mediocre state university. My ex girlfriend had her hand held for literally years by Microsoft recruiters on the stated…

> Anecdotally it really does exist

You can take just about any conceivable trend and anecdotally "confirm" its existence based on a small enough sample size or the right anecdote. That doesn't mean it is statistically relevant.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#24

Post by masterzora »

codex wrote: post #17
masterzora wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, first, can we drop the overuse of female/male? It makes us sound like we're talking about specimens in a bio lab rather than people and introduces issues wrt the nonequivalence of female and woman or male and man. That said, to a large extent you are correct but you are framing it poorly. One of the major steps of breaking the gender gap is to spend more resources on, not just finding women, but also encouragin…

You have a budget of one hundred identical recruiters and need to get 1000 female applicants and 500 male applicants to apply for up to 100 internship slots to meet your goal of hiring twice the percentage of women in CS programs. In your country, all of the colleges are segregated; there are 100 all-male and 100 all-female colleges. All of them are having job fairs next week. For each job fair you attend, you know y…

Okay, sure, in your highly-fictional, strangely-exact, not-at-all-representative-of-reality example more mens' colleges will be left out than womens' colleges. In reality, not a single part of your scenario actually holds and even the parts that are close aren't that close. I'd do just as well to assume in your scenario that all candidates are uniform, frictionless spheres in a vaccum where gravity is reversed.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#25

Post by nostrademons »

codex wrote: post #8

A long time ago, I was once a Microsoft intern attending a party at Bill Gates' house. At that party, a high-ranking Microsoft HR employee told me that it was Microsoft's goal to have twice the percentage of female interns in their program than female CS majors. For example, if women only made up 10% of college CS majors, Microsoft wanted to have 20% female interns. I replied that, if that were their goal, they would…

Not really - there's a really simple solution for hiring more women without dropping the bar for them. Make your company the most desirable place for anyone to work, so that you have vastly more applicants than positions, and then you can pick whoever you want as the incoming cohort. Math:

Say that your goal is to hire from the top 1% of the field, and the top 1% is indistinguishable from each other. There are 1 million people in the field, and you will be hiring 1,000 this year. Also say that women make up 10% of the field. In this scenario, there are 10,000 people that you would be happy to work for you, and 1,000 of them are women.

If only 10% of prospective employees would even consider working for you (which is the case for many startups, and probably for present-day Microsoft), then you're trying to fill a class of 1000 from a universe of 1,000 candidates, and only 100 of the women both apply and meet your hiring threshold. The best you can do is 10% female interns.

If, however, everyone in the field wants to work for your company, you have a universe of 10,000 candidates, 1,000 are women, and you're trying to fill a class of 1,000. You can have a female proportion anywhere from 0-100% with no loss of quality.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#26

Post by jobu »

scott_s wrote: post #20

Anecdotally, I know that myself and most of my friends deal with the impostor syndrome. But, I also think it's important not to fall prey to what I think is the opposite problem: the narrative fallacy. It's easy to feel that you were "fated" for many positions. Or, if not some form of predestination, then some notion that things were "bound" to happen. I know that there was an enormous amount of luck in how I ended u…

Your post made me think of a recent comic: Luck > Good (http://abstrusegoose.com/494)

I'm not sure that's true in the long run, but in some very important situations it certainly can be.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#27

Post by dkarl »

When they want to flatter students or buck up their spirits, professors at selective colleges are prone to saying things like, "The fact that you're even here means something." It's a good idea to let that thinking go as soon as possible. The fact that you're here, there, or anywhere means nothing. The world is complicated. In a sense her friend was right to point out that being female in a field that is desperate for more female representation is usually an advantage, but he was wrong to be certain -- sexism is still rampant among computing professionals. More importantly, he was wrong to care. Actually, they were both wrong to think that they could know the answer to the question and both wrong to think it was important.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#28

Post by jobu »

My personal belief is that a diversity of backgrounds and life experiences outweigh intelligence and skill to a fair degree. It counteracts group-think, and fosters more innovation and creativity.

So don't feel guilty about how or why you got an opportunity. You came by it honestly, and whether Microsoft feels their benefit from you is due to your ability or your gender, the fact is you are benefiting them or they wouldn't give you the opportunity. Enjoy it and use the chance to improve yourself as much as possible.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#29

Post by scarmig »

jobu wrote: post #28

My personal belief is that a diversity of backgrounds and life experiences outweigh intelligence and skill to a fair degree. It counteracts group-think, and fosters more innovation and creativity. So don't feel guilty about how or why you got an opportunity. You came by it honestly, and whether Microsoft feels their benefit from you is due to your ability or your gender, the fact is you are benefiting them or they wo…

In my experience, mixed-gender workplaces are a far better environment than the alternative. Last team I worked on was 40% female on the engineering side, and it was an absolute pleasure. Skills and productivity weren't disproportionately on one side or another, either.

Particularly, as a grown-up with a family, I appreciate the salutory effect that women have on subduing frat-house atmospheres. You probably find fewer women who think of themselves as rockstar ninja pirate hackers, but I'm pretty sure that's not a bad or uneconomic thing.

Re: How to Reinforce Impostor Syndrome

#30

Post by codex »

nostrademons wrote: post #25
codex wrote: post #8

A long time ago, I was once a Microsoft intern attending a party at Bill Gates' house. At that party, a high-ranking Microsoft HR employee told me that it was Microsoft's goal to have twice the percentage of female interns in their program than female CS majors. For example, if women only made up 10% of college CS majors, Microsoft wanted to have 20% female interns. I replied that, if that were their goal, they would…

Not really - there's a really simple solution for hiring more women without dropping the bar for them. Make your company the most desirable place for anyone to work, so that you have vastly more applicants than positions, and then you can pick whoever you want as the incoming cohort. Math: Say that your goal is to hire from the top 1% of the field, and the top 1% is indistinguishable from each other. There are 1 mill…

The strategy you describe drops the bar for all employees in order to achieve a gender target.

This is not how companies operate, for the most part. If a company wants to hire 1,000 people and 10,000 applicants are in the top 1%, they will move the bar up to hire the top 0.1% instead.

Given a normal distirbution of applicants, there is a huge difference in talent (10x?) between top 1% and top 0.1%. The bar always automatically adjusts higher; otherwise, a competitor will hire the fraction of the 0.1% that you've passed over. Now the competitor has a 1,000 workers, and you have 1,000 workers, but the competitors are 10x more talented for the same pay (most of the 0.1% didn't get an offer from you, so there's no bidding war for their talents).

Actually, if a company spends more money recruiting each equivalent female employee than male employee, they do effectively drop their total hiring bar if spending more money lets the company climb the bell curve, because it's effectively a reduction in spending efficency, but that effect is small, and skill parity is still achieved.

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